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All those leftover Christmas cranberries may be more useful than you think.

A new study, to be published in the February 2014 issue of Experimental Gerontology, has found that the antioxidant properties in cranberries may prolong your life.

A limitation of the study is it was conducted on fruit flies, not humans. But the research team at Baltimore's National Institute on Aging says the biological stages of the flies correspond with that of humans, so the findings can count toward a deeper study.

The researchers fed the flies either sugar or sugar supplemented with 2% cranberry extract during three stages of their lives -- young adulthood, middle age and old age.

The study found that younger flies given the cranberry extract lived 25% longer than the flies given only sugar, while the middle- and old-age flies given cranberry extract had their lifespan's extended by 30%.